So I pulled out Flash 8 to kind of keep my hand in it today and came up with this drunken owl. He made me fairly happy today amidst the crush and pull of the crazy mundane crap. I think he probably needs more contrast, but I'm going to try some other techniques out tomorrow.

I wonder why my vector art never tends to turn into a jpg very gracefully? (I.e. retain its beautiful vector crispness when it's a jpg) Is there a way to do this that I'm overlooking?

Edit: So I solved some of the problem by exporting the image from Flash at a higher dpi resolution - 300 dpi instead of 72 - and exporting as a png file. If you click on the owl below, you'll actually see a much improved image. However, the shrinking Blogger does in order to make a button for this post currently makes the vectors look a bit yucky on this page. I'm still wondering if I can preserve a vector-friendly file that will present itself gracefully once it's been turned into a button. Hmm...

Labels: Flash, Lopes, Michelle Lopes, vector

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I turned 27 today! In celebration, I took a nice long hike with my guy at the Will Rogers State Park. Also, Little Dude was introduced to the family and as you can see, he's quite fond of cake. Or screaming at people. One can't be quite certain...

Labels: 27, birthday, Lopes, Michelle Lopes

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According to imdb's STARmeter, my popularity fell 80 percent this week. DEAR LORD IN HEAVEN, HOW COULD THIS BE? Could it be, perchance, that I'm not actually a star? Well paint me disillusioned. I'll have to cancel my catered dinner for seventy I was holding tonight...in my one bedroom apartment. Yes, the canapes were going to be by the litter box, and I suspect it would have been extremely awkward to talk shop around the leopard geckos, but really? Take away my glittering stardom? How utterly heartless!

Labels: Lopes, Michelle Lopes, popularity, star, stardom

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I haven't posted recently because I wanted newcomers to the blog to see my movie before they caught a gander of anything else. Life has been pretty hectic, and yet static all the same. I've been running around doing errands (getting money and a smog check for my car registration, taking care of a sick kitty that went to the emergency room, and all the little things in between) and been absolutely stagnant creatively. I worked on some drawings, but need to go into school or Kinko's to scan them (and after drawing them, discovered I'd run out of paper...yeesh). In the interim, I've been making notes on a post I'd like to do about female characters - specifically protagonists - in animation. That'll get posted once I get a moment to breathe a bit.

I'm reading (and probably going to finish today) The Fabulous Clipjoint by Frederic Brown as a recommendation from the Kunz. It's a clean, easy read with a lot of neat language that harangues and pulls and plummets all at once - very good stuff. The crime is mildly interesting, but the characters are the real treat - complex, yet tidy in description and execution. This will be my Kindle read while I wait out the twenty (or thirty, or forty) minute smog check today. I gotta say, knowing what percentage of a book I've read doesn't compare to having good old-fashioned page numbers.

Labels: creativity, Frederic Brown, hectic, Kindle, Lopes, Michelle Lopes, stagnant, The Fabulous Clipjoint

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This is the film I made for my computer animation requirement. I used primarily After Effects and Photoshop, drawing a great deal of it by hand in computer and offline. It's a little choppy to play at the moment, so I'll likely recompress it and try uploading another version soon.

Edit: I swapped it out for another version which you're watching now.

Labels: 2D animation, animation, computer animation, Flicker, Lopes, Michelle Lopes

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